Success starts with having a clear vision and how effectively you are communicating your objectives and strategies with your franchisees. The potential of using Business Plans for strategic planning is proportional to the adoption of your strategies within your organization. Internally, you may already be at different stages in the deployment of a strategic planning process throughout different teams.
You might already be doing strategic planning, however only in particular teams like the leadership team. If so, other teams could benefit from alignment with leadership - such as directors, managers, coaches, and franchisees.
Your organization may already be doing strategic planning at various levels and you are looking to improve the adoption of existing strategies.
Perhaps you are only now getting started with strategic planning.
Strategies are the most impactful when they are transparent across all teams within your organization. When people’s objectives are visible by anybody within your organization, it drives engagement and ownership towards the completion of strategic initiatives.
Using the following implementation strategy will help you successfully adopt strategic planning with FranchiseBlast Business Plans.
You should adapt this approach to your particular business needs, however, or skip some of those steps if you already have an ongoing process for strategic planning.
Choose Your Influencers
Implementing a strategic planning program often represents a major change within an organization and a learning curve for everyone. Assigning an ambassador to lead the strategic program helps to guide the organization through the change.
That person acts as the central point of communication to provide guidance on what best practices to follow. The program ambassador should also act as the administrator of the program within FranchiseBlast for your organization.
If you are reading this, it is likely that this person is you!
Get Buy-in from Leadership
Establishing a strong objective-driven culture within your team starts with leadership. Since a strategic planning implementation might require people within the organization to change the way they think about doing business, it is important to get a commitment from a leader to leverage their influence in convincing the team(s) on the benefits of the program.
Start with the leader of an individual team within your organization to trial the program at a localized level. On the other end of the spectrum, you can convince the C-suite directly to fast track the implementation of the program. In any case, there are several things you can do to convince leaders about the value of the program - for example:
Prepare a presentation about the benefits of the program for an all-hands meeting
Utilize a success story from another company similar to yours to prove the return on investment of the program.
Share a success story from a team within your organization that has already implemented the program to get buy-in from senior leadership.
Define a Rollout Strategy
Now that you have got the commitment of one or more leaders within your organization, it is time to formalize your plan with them. There are several ways to go about it depending on your organization’s culture. The following are some common elements we found to be important in most organizations.
First, you have to determine which team(s) are going to be part of the initial launch. Here are some of the common scenarios we have observed:
Start off by launching a pilot between a few franchisees and a coach with a bottom-up approach. Choose a diverse set of franchisees to ensure you get a good overview of the learning curve and avoid surprises when expanding the program to other franchisees. Things to consider when choosing franchisees could include the strength of the relationship you have with them to provide feedback and how tech-savvy they are.
Launch the program for all coaching teams first, and deploy with franchisees after coaches are at ease with the program. This top-down approach ensures that coaches have a good understanding of best practices to be able to advocate them to your franchisees.
Launch the program in all teams simultaneously in an organization-wide rollout. This is most common for people that are starting from scratch in their strategic implementation, or for those who want to fast-track the implementation speed of the program. In that case, you should still initially launch a pilot with a few people to get a grip on the process and quickly expand to other teams afterward.
Once you know who you need to work with, you should set a timeline for the program rollout. For instance, if your approach starts with a pilot, schedule a timeline to evaluate the pilot. If the pilot is successful, when would you expect to be expanding the program to other teams?
Having a clear timeline for the implementation of the program drives accountability. Additionally, setting milestones increases the likelihood of rapid adoption throughout your teams by providing transparency when it comes to expectations.
Find Your Rhythm
Objectives should be time-bound in order to drive accountability and to set expectations as to when you expect them to reach completion. It can vary widely depending on your organization.
For instance, you can define a yearly strategic plan with broader objectives and complement it with quarterly plans that focus on a smaller scope.
Begin by reviewing objectives quarterly with your team, as it is easier for team members to understand objectives and come up with short-term initiatives than thinking about the long term. It is also a good balance between the overhead of reviewing objectives each month, or losing touch with your objectives that aren’t in sight for yearly objectives.
Once you know which time horizon to bound your objectives to, you need to know how often you are going to evaluate how you’re doing within a period. It is easy to set and forget objectives only to realize at the end of a period that you didn’t reach them because you lost focus on what matters.
Setting a fixed interval for check-ins helps you with:
Keeping laser focus on what matters by keeping objectives top of mind
Ensuring key results are accurate measures that are updated regularly
Driving engagement on initiatives in your strategies across your teams
When deciding what your team’s check-in interval length should be, keep in mind that updating results regularly will come with some overhead. It is likely that members of your team will need to navigate across a variety of systems and spreadsheets to find and crunch the numbers to update the plan periodically.
You will find the right balance by experimenting with different check-in interval lengths while executing your strategies, and by utilizing different results tracking techniques to become more efficient. Consequently, you should prioritize which metrics are the most important to measure your objectives when writing your strategies and only track a handful of metrics to begin with.
Start with a bi-weekly check-in interval length to get your team ramped up. That means your team will touch base every two weeks to give an update on the results they are accountable for. For plans with a quarterly period, that represents about six touchpoints within each period. It keeps the dialog open and ensures that you can change course before it’s too late if you aren’t confident the initiatives in place won’t make you reach your objectives.
Wrap-up
That’s it for defining your approach! You are all up to speed on how to define your approach to get started with using Business Plans in FranchiseBlast.
Next up, we'll take a closer look at how to find areas of opportunity, how to streamline goal-setting in a franchise setting, and best practices to define objectives and key results.
